Cookie Shack

She could do things that no one else could, so I hoped that she could help me in a way that no else else could, too.

Originally posted on Urban Legends, Local Myths, and More discussion board of NewJerseySpooks.com forum by user [REDACTED], 03/04/2005 01:29:31 UTC

Does anyone here know about the Cookie Shack in West Milford? Someone else already started a thread on the ghost animals at West Mil’s abandoned zoo, but I haven’t seen anyone bring up the Cookie Shack yet. Kinda surprised to see no one has since it was basically the Now Now Now Girl of my middle school days. This was back in the early nineties when most adults didn’t have a mobile phone and even then they were expensive and coverage was pretty spotty in most places, especially out in the boonies, so we had to call our spooks on payphones and landlines, ha ha ha.

The legend was that there was this number that was being passed around that you could call and it would connect you to some little girl or a woman that sounded like one (that part depended on who was telling the story). She wouldn’t answer, just pick up the phone and not say anything until you said, “I’d like to order some cookies”, or something along those lines. If you said anything else, she’d just hang up on you. If you said the magic words, though, she’d ask you what kind of cookies you wanted.

You could just tell her that you wanted any normal kind of cookie like chocolate chip or sugar or oatmeal raisin (yuck!), but that wasn’t really why you’d give her a call. You’d be wasting your quarters at the payphone if you did. The legend said you could ask for basically any kind of cookie. A cookie to cure the flu. A cookie that would make whoever ate it fall in love with you. A cookie to make you look younger or older or live longer.

She’d reply to your request by telling you if she could fulfill it or not, and if she could, she’d ask you a question. So far as I heard, she never asked the same question twice. What question she asked depended on what you asked her for. If you asked her for a run of the mill chocolate chip cookie, or something similarly plain, she’d ask you an appropriately normal question. What’s your middle name? What does your dad do for work? What’s your favorite color? That kind of thing.

If you asked for something a little more wild than a normal cookie you could buy at the store, she’d ask more personal questions. Who do you have crush on? What’s your greatest fear? What’s your biggest regret?

But if you asked her for something really crazy, like a cookie that could cure cancer? She’d ask you something just as bizarre. When the story of the Cookie Shack first started spreading around school, one kid claimed that the mystery baker had asked him for the number on his father’s American Express card.

Needless to say, he didn’t get the cookie he asked for.

So, if you answered the girl on the phone’s question honestly, you could wake up the next morning expecting to find the requested cookie. Another kid claimed that his brother’s friend had found the chocolate chip cookie he’d asked for in his mailbox, neatly wrapped in sheets of old newspaper printed months prior. Another said that a friend of a friend, since those were predictably the only people successfully requesting and receiving cookies from the Cookie Shack, found the cookie he wanted nestled in his shoe where he’d left it in his garage. There was even this one guy at my school who found a cookie in his locker. We were pretty sure he’d planted it there for attention, in spite of his insistence otherwise.

Now, if you didn’t answer her question honestly out of ignorance, or if you just didn’t give her an answer at all, you didn’t get anything. If you outright lied to her, though, or gave her some bullshit answer to mess with her… well, again, this detail depended on who was telling the story. Some said that you’d get your cookie, alright, but eating it would be hazardous to your health. It’d either be poisoned or have broken glass in it, or something similarly unpalatable (and inedible). Others said that you’d just disappear, never to be seen again… perhaps to be used as an ingredient in a particularly savory cookie, if you catch my drift.

It was called the Cookie Shack because that’s what the girl on the phone called it. Where it was, nobody seemed to know. The general consensus was that it was somewhere deep in the woods outside of town, and more than a few people went to find it. I remember one group of kids claimed to have seen it, and described it as some sort of quaint, idyllic little cottage, stuck square in the middle of a clearing. One of these kids was the same one who said he saw the Jersey Devil while camping in the Pine Barrens, though, so nobody put much stock in what he said.

Of course, the only kids that ever seemed to fall afoul of the baker were never in West Mildford, and no one could never name names, not even for those who supposedly got their cookie and lived to tell the tale. But that’s usually how urban legends go, right? It’s always a friend of a friend who went to a different school, or someone’s brother’s college roomate’s cousin (twice removed) who managed to get in contact with the enigmatic cookie maker.

West Mildford is not and never has been the biggest, most exciting place to live. There wasn’t much for bored young teens to do, so, naturally, the Cookie Shack became a pretty hot topic of discussion among the youth. Naturally, I felt compelled to call the number. It took some asking around before I finally managed to find someone who claimed to actually know it. They swore they’d tried it and the person on the other side was the Cookie Shack girl, but they got freaked out and didn’t place an order.

One weekend while I was staying at a friend’s house, we gave the number a call on his home phone. Honestly, I expected someone to pick it up, but I didn’t think it’d be any supernatural baker. If anything, I expected it to be this kid’s neighbor they didn’t like, and someone they wanted to torment by overloading them with constant calls from dumb middle schoolers asking for magic cookies. So, I wasn’t all that surprised when someone picked up.

“Hello?”

That was all they said. It was, indeed, a woman, and she did, indeed, sound awful young, but not exactly little girl young. She answered the phone as casually as anyone else would.

With my friend leaning against my shoulder, desperate to hear the mythical cookie baking woman himself, I said the magic words: “I’d like to order a cookie.”

“Alright,” said the woman. “And what kind would you like?”

At that point, I was overcome with that kind of dread that only comes with the distinct epiphany that you might have just fucked up. I have to stress that I did not expect for the person on the other end of the line to be anyone but some random person who’d tell me to piss off. The fact that they had answered exactly as they were supposed to per the legend meant one of two things; either this was some sort of prank the kid I got the number from was playing on me, and this was his sister or friend on the line that in on the joke, or the Cookie Shack was more than just a playground story.

I dithered for a moment before my friend jabbed me in the side, prompting me to blurt out the first kind of cookie that came to mind.

“Butter pecan.”

My friend gave me a look like, Who the fuck eats butter pecan cookies?, and completely failed to notice that my hand was shaking like a leaf in a hurricane.

For a moment, the woman said nothing. I thought she might have hung up on me. Was butter pecan outside of her repertoire? Was she not a fan, perhaps?

“Easy enough,” she said, prompting a sigh of relief from me. “Just one more thing, real quick.”

She went silent again, and this time, I was hoping she’d just hung up.

“What’s your mother’s maiden name?”

It took me a moment to remember, but I gave it to her.

During the ensuing moment of silence, I heard a faint scratching noise come through the receiver. I realized that she was writing.

“Alright. I’ll start working on your order. It’ll be ready tomorrow,” she said, sounding much more friendly and pleasant than before.

I muttered out a word of thanks, to which she replied in a chipper, upbeat voice, “And thank you for calling the Cookie Shack. Please do enjoy.”

And with that, she hung up on me.

My friend was ecstatic, though over what, I’m still not sure; was it because we’d managed to contact the Cookie Shack, or just because we’d finally found proof that there was at least one urban legend that wasn’t total bullshit? I, however, was worried that I’d just made a deal with some sort of cookie baking demon, or something. I had no reason to believe as much, but the idea kind of stuck with me. At the very least, I’d just wasted my opportunity to snag a magic cookie that could make me taller or stronger or convince my dad to buy me a Sega Genesis if he ate it on a mundane butter pecan cookie.

As the night went on, my anxiety and regret began to fade as I came around to the idea that it really was just a prank at my expense. By the time we went to bed, I was not expecting to find a cookie in my shoe or my locker or anywhere else other than the pantry back at my house, and one from a bag my parents had bought at the store, at that.

When I woke up, the first thing my friend and I did was search the room. No cookie to be found. I didn’t find one in my shoe, either. On the car ride back to my house, both of us were in firm agreement that we’d been had by someone’s older sister. We both swore never to speak about the incident to preserve our dignity among our classmates. When I got home, I put it out of my mind completely and went to my room and prepared for a long Sunday of working on my home-made, hand-drawn comics.

You can probably imagine my shock when I opened the desk drawer to get some pens and found something wrapped in old newspaper, sitting nicely on top of my art supplies.

Just like that, the anxiety over what I’d done returned, and this time, it was damn near debilitating. I didn’t even want to touch it. It actually took me more than a few minutes to gather up the courage to take it out. Underneath the paper was exactly what I’d asked for - a butter pecan cookie. Fresh. Lovely, too.

It took me hours of deliberation to decide on what to do with it. Part of me wanted to eat it, partially to see if it tasted as good as it looked, partially to prove to myself that it was real, and partially because I wanted to be one of the few people who could say they ate a product of the Cookie Shack. The more logical, sensible part of me wanted to throw it away.

In the end, curiosity won out. If the stories were true, as it was apparent they were, I’d been completely honest with the unknown baker. Given the way her demeanor became so much more genial after I answered her question, I had a feeling she knew that. If that was the case, I had nothing to worry about.

It was the single best cookie I’d ever tasted in my life.

Only after I finished it did I notice that, inside the newspaper that it had been wrapped in, Thank you! had been written in loopy letters and black marker.

I didn’t tell anyone about the cookie. I kind of wanted to, if only for bragging rights, but no one would believe me. I didn’t even tell my friend, if only because I knew he probably wouldn’t, either. I dabbled with the idea of calling the Cookie Shack again with him and this time, showing him what came, but I thought better of it. Again, every detail of the legend I’d heard had turned out to be true. That meant that the fact that something bad would happen if you lied was true, too. While I had no intention of lying to the girl behind the Cookie Shack, I also felt it was best to not press my luck and ask for too much.

Then seventh grade rolled around.

This new kid came to our school. He was transferred from another school in town due to behavioral issues, and his reputation didn’t just preceded him, it didn’t do him any justice, either. This kid was known for being a troublemaker, but that wasn’t the half of it. There was something wrong with him. Deeply, profoundly wrong. This kid wasn’t a bully, he was a psychopath. Like, literally caught killing and torturing animals kind of unhinged. He was already known to the local cops and why they didn’t do anything about his bullshit, let alone just dumped him on our school, is beyond me. I was pretty sure he was on the fast-track to killing someone. Only a few months into the school year, I was afraid it was gonna be me.

Due to reasons beyond my control, I managed to attract his attention. All the conventional advice adults gave me on dealing with bullies was, as I always suspected them to be, bunk. There was no being the bigger man with this guy. No amount of deescalation could get him off your back. Avoiding him only excited him more, and ensured that he’d be extra nasty when he found you. Eventually, it got to the point that he cornered me one day after school. I’ll spare you the lurid details. You don’t want to know them and frankly I hate recalling them. Just know he said some things to me that no seventh grader should ever hear, and promised that he’d do things to me no one should ever do. Just vile, vile shit.

I was rightly terrified, and worse, I was at my wit’s end. No amount of going to the adults had helped. If anything, it only made his harassment worse. My parents had tried to intervene, only for the school staff to dismiss their concerns out of hands. The faculty was worse than useless. I knew that short of running away, my options were exceedingly limited.

So, as I hurried home that day, looking over my back the whole time, I stopped at a gas station along the way. I fished out some pocket change and dumped it into the payphone. I thought I remembered a certain number, but when someone from the nearby Burger King picked up, I knew I didn’t. I spent a while just standing there, looking at the last of my quarters in the palm of my hand, debating on whether or not to give it one more try. I knew that if I failed again, I could just use the home phone, but I knew my parents would have questions if I sat there typing random numbers into the phone for hours, trying to find out which one I’d forgotten.

I put in the quarters. I tapped out the number, changing one digit to what I prayed was correct.

Words cannot convey the relief I felt when I heard a very familiar, “Hello?”

You have to understand that I was desperate. I feared for my life. I’d seen what this mystery baker could do. She could do things that no one else could, so I hoped that she could help me in a way that no else else could, too.

We did the whole spiel. I asked to order a cookie. When she asked what kind, I told her the truth: I wanted a cookie that could kill that fucker.

The silence that followed was probably not as long as it felt, but I could have sworn I stood there for the better part of an hour in that freezing cold payphone booth waiting for her reply. It was, after all, a pretty steep ask.

Then, she asked me a very simple question - “Why?”

So, I told her. In detail. Every single one. Every threat. Every injury. Every minute I’d suffered coping with his bullshit.

Again, she said nothing. And this time, the line did go dead.

When I went to bed that night, I was certain that if this bully didn’t get me, then the proprietor of the Cookie Shack would for having made such a request. Who was I to ask her for something capable of taking a human life? Though I thought I was perfectly justified, I couldn’t help but think that she strongly disagreed.

I went to school the next day praying that, if nothing else, God might intervene. One might think that as a Catholic, I should have just started there, but I was in need of the kind of immediate results that my prayers had failed to manifest. When my antagonist’s desk was empty come second period, I breathed a heavy sigh of relief and said a silent prayer of thanks.

When it was unoccupied the day after that, I began to think that some anonymous benefactor really had interceded on my behalf.

On the third day, I was certain someone had, though I didn’t know who it was until the details of what happened spread around the school during the coming week. On that day, we received news that the individual who had made my life a living Hell had been found in the woods outside of town. Dead.

There were signs of a struggle. Scratches on the arms. Bruises all over. Lacerations around the mouth. The police tried to keep it all hush hush, but in a town like West Mil, news travels fast. They claimed that he’d been murdered in a dispute over drugs. A deal gone bad. Wouldn’t have been out of the realm of possibility.

But an autopsy determined that the cause of death to be internal hemorrhaging of the windpipe. There were shards of broken glass lodged in his esophagus. What kind of fucked up drug dealer would kill someone by forcing them eat shattered glass? That didn’t make sense to anyone.

But it did make sense to me when I read that the only piece of hard evidence the police collected were pages from a newspaper, printed months ago, stuffed in his mouth. On it, they said the killer left a simple message - Choke on it.

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Gotta watch those calories.